Return to the Walled Garden
by icameherejusttosaythis
Summary: Ashana nar Vesta wakes on the Citadel after being rescued on a distant colony world by Liara T'Soni.


Blood and Bone

**A/N: This story deals with a minor character who featured in a few chapters from my story "Little Wing." You need not have read the earlier piece to follow what's going on here, but there are probably lots of spoilers for "Little Wing." Happy Holidays to everyone out there, and hoping all goes well for you in the New Year. As always, I hope to hear from you. **

Shen was dead. That was one of the few things Ashana nar Vesta still knew for certain when she woke after surgery.

In those first days, after she was first conscious again and at last understood that her wounds would likely not kill her, Ashana would sometimes see a young turian sitting at her bedside, always reading something on a little screen in front of him. _Spirit book _he said, the first time he'd seen her awake. He gave her a name, _Varian_, and touched her hand in a way that seemed kind.

Those days—unspeakable pain, so much she thought she was drowning in a roiling ocean of her own blood, with nothing to hold onto but a raft made of jagged shards of bone. Talking to the doctors later, it might as well have been the truth. Organs, skin, muscle, all of it had been grown new in a lab next door. _Nothing but the best_, her salarian doctor told her. With a wink, he'd said, _Good as new. No. Better, because new_. And then the drugs pulled her down again into the blood ocean, where she dreamt her mouth was full of someone else's hair.

Her geth symbiote wasn't with her, when she called out to it, there wasn't a response. Normally she didn't have to call, it simply was. At her side, pacing along thought for thought with her own mind, answering so readily she'd forgotten it wasn't inborn. Ashana had never been without her. She'd always thought of her geth as female, instead of a multitude of voices that swam through her thoughts that were so much a part of her thinking mind that she almost couldn't do it without her.

But Shen was dead. She'd seen him running in the opening of the Anthill, demolition charges in each hand while a krogan charged him, another one of their team already in his hands. Ashana had watched as the krogan twisted and pulled the man's head clear, as easily as if he'd been opening a bottle. Then a wall of light, followed by dust and dark, and a watery ringing in her ears.

Shen had blown the entrance, or tried to. It hadn't saved anyone. The blast was too small to do much aside from stop, if not quite kill, the krogan and to scatter the entryway with a new layer of dust and debris. And the krogan's friends had come racing in after him, shooting anything that moved, including her.

Somehow she'd managed to run a few hundred meters down the corridor before her body had realized it was hurt. As if by some miracle, she had found someone there, as though they'd been waiting for her, and had carried her from that awful place on Esan and put her on a ship and brought her here. When she saw the turian next, she asked if it had been him.

"That was me," he said, and touched her hand again. "I had help."

She began to ask him a question, but he motioned for her to stop. He would tell her everything later, he said.

"Now rest, okay?"

#

The next day, he was still there, looking as though he hadn't moved. Perhaps he hadn't. Ashana stirred in the bed, and he turned to her.

"Any better?" he asked, but before she could answer a nurse came in to check. And a few minutes after that, the doctor came. He was a salarian, a scrawny creature, who stared at her with his giant black eyes. He had white markings around his mouth and nostrils, and yellow tips on his horns. Salarians sometimes claimed yellow spots were lucky.

"We're doing the muscle grafts today. Been growing them since you first came in. Now we have enough to fix you up. Skin's next, after that, but skin grows slower."

When he'd gone, Varian spoke to her a little about his home on Palaven. He'd grown up not in Cipritine, but in Niveris, farther north, and on the other side of the planet, where there hadn't been as much damage from the war. His mother and father had worked for years in the orbital construction business, but had retired, and finally died a few months apart from each other. He had two older sisters, and he was afraid he wasn't going to see them for a while. No money to go visit, he told her, before she could ask him why.

He had a call, and she drifted off to sleep for a while. When she woke, he was standing in the far corner of the room, talking to an asari whose face looked familiar. The doctors were just outside, and an orderly came in pushing wheeled bed. Varian and the asari came over to her, and the asari held her hand.

"Did you carry me?" she said. The asari had dark facial markings at the bridge of her nose and on her chin.

"No," she said. "I only flew the ship." She reached down and touched Ashana's hand. Her fingers were warm. "Good luck with your operation."

The asari and the turian moved off into the corner. The turian was asking, "We really can't wait a few hours to see if she comes through?" and the asari answered, "We can't."

They were wheeling Ashana out of the room now on her way to the preoperative station, past the Varian and asari. Varian said, "See you soon." He smiled. Then they were in the bright corridors of the hospital and then riding down a lift that was wide enough hold three of these rolling beds side by side. In the operating room, a human nurse injected something into a tube in her arm, and first she felt calm and then the lights went out.

#

When she woke it was night on the Presidium. She vaguely remembered having talked to the surgeon in recovery. Everything had gone well, he'd told her. Now she needed rest.

The lights were on low, and she was only in minimal pain. Through the glass, she could see people walking along the water in the Presidium. Varian was gone. She asked one of the nurses about it. He'd left before she'd gone into surgery, but before he'd gone, he'd charmed one of the nurses into taking down his extranet address.

He hadn't returned in the morning, or the following night. _He's gone_ a thought told her, and Ashana smiled because she knew her geth had returned. _Where were you? _She wondered. They had been to the collective, beyond the veil, and returned. It had been a wondrous place. They could not describe, and yet she understood. _Like here_, she thought, _at the center of everything._ And they had answered, _No. Not at all like this_.

#

There was lots of recovering to do. Four times a day, the nurses came and forced her to get out of bed to go to the loo, or bathe, or just walk from her bed to the door. In no time at all, she was strong enough that she could get up on her own, though sitting up made her muscles knot and twist. More than once the pain made her vomit.

Meanwhile her geth had sent word to the quarian embassy, and someone came to see her, an youngish man from the diplomatic corps, starched and formal, not at all the kind of person she wanted to see. Descendent of the Admiralty Board, and a useless twat as far as she was concerned, trading on reputation to get ahead.

"I understand you were wounded while scavenging on Esan," he said. _Scavenging_. She'd have grabbed his pasty throat if she could have just sat up quickly. She'd been a runner, tall for a quarian, fast and lean. And now, at twenty-two, she was a cripple. Likely she'd have a limp for all her days. A limp if she were lucky, otherwise, she'd need a medical exoskeleton to help heft her body around.

Children, too, were out of the question. Abdominal wounds and the female body did not go together. The womb itself could be regrown, but the maternal cells—she'd been born with them. There was nothing to do to about it. Of course, the doctor had told her, perhaps she could carry a labgrown embryo.

Meanwhile the diplomat, born of a father who had known the great-grandchildren of Tali'zorah vas Normandy, could barely hide the sneer, the slight closing of his big black eyes. He had no idea what things were like. _Vas_ Rannoch—his family had grabbed the name same as they'd grabbed up as much land as they could, like it belonged to them. Meanwhile some others, like Ashana nar Vesta, had to struggle for a living.

"I'm to make a report to my superiors," said Son of Admiralty, spitting the word _superiors_, as though it had no meaning to him. "If you remember anything of your experience on Esan, I'll add it to the final document."

Ashana closed her eyes. There was Shen, the too-small demolition charges in either hand, sidestepping the krogan as it charged in. Someone was shouting _Blow it! Blow it before they kill us all_, and the krogan, throwing his newest victim aside turned to attack. Then darkness and an angry, wounded krogan. Ashana looked at vas Rannoch and shook her head.

"I don't remember much," she said, "just that we were looking for a marking painted on a wall."

"What was the marking?" he asked, "Can you show me?" He held out his data pad and she drew it for him. He studied it carefully before going back to his report.

"Do you know who attacked you?" the Son of Admiralty asked.

Ashana shook her head. She described the krogan. Dark brown uniform with yellow gauntlets. Red stripe on his helmet.

"That's all?" he asked. Ashana nodded. Doing even that hurt her. "Do you know if anyone else from your team might have survived? I'll be notifying their families later today.

"No one," Ashana said. "Only me."

Son of Admiralty nodded and then reached for her hand. For a moment she thought he meant to comfort her, but he was instead feeling for the leads in her palm, where his geth might commune with hers. She withdrew her hand and told him she wasn't feeling well.

She asked him to shut the blinds before he left. "Of course," he said.

All afternoon, after physical therapy, the news played footage of a place called Pirin. The turian did not return.

#

Shen was dead. She'd known it before, but only now did she really understand it. Through the veil of the pain medication, and the itch and tearing of her body's healing, she felt it. He'd never loved her, not the way she'd wanted him to, but that didn't change what she had felt. Life did that to you, it made you fall for the wrong person.

Shen had always been about their operation. He loved their ship, he loved their crew, and in that way he'd loved her. It hadn't been the right way.

She'd known that. There'd been his _official_ mate, a young woman named Zera not much older than Ashana herself. She was dead now, too. But even Zera had mattered less to Shen than other things. Perhaps they'd both known it all along, but had seen it confirmed when they'd received a special transmission, an eyes-only for Shen. He'd come back from the comm station looking gray. "Wrap it up," he'd said, of their salvaging operation. "This is more important than old metal."

#

A quarian named Gell came to see her. He was more to her liking than Son of Admiralty. Her geth had sought him out and suggested they meet. A structural engineer, he worked down on the wards. He joked about taking her to Zakera Point, to look up at the Presidium. "When you're better," he'd said.

When he'd gone, her geth told her, _He knows the asari who saved your life. She's paying to make sure you recover_.

"Who is she?" Ashana asked.

_T'soni,_ her geth answered. _A great hero._

#

When would she be better? She asked the doctor. The salarian shrugged. She was walking now, wasn't she? Yes. But when could she leave? He touched his chin, what little chin salarians had, and shook his head. He simply couldn't say.

A few days later, during the shift change, she got out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, and undressed to take a shower. In the mirror, she looked at her pale belly, the skin grafts weren't the same shade as the rest of her skin, and underneath, the lab-grown muscle fibers knotted and burned if she wasn't careful how she moved. She washed herself, and put on some clothes that someone from a relief agency had brought her. She took the cane she'd been using with the physical therapist, just to be sure. Walking to the nurses' station, she tapped on the desk and said to the asari who was engrossed in her notes, "May I go for a walk?"

"You can go as far as the cafeteria," the nurse answered. "It's one level down. I recommend you don't use the stairs."

Ashana went to the elevator. A crowd was already there, and she slipped in behind them. She decided to ride all the way down to the lobby instead of pushing her way back through the crowd. And once there, decided not to go to the cafeteria, but instead walk across the lobby. No one stopped her, not even as she made for the revolving doors, and stepped out into the bright light of the Presidium's early afternoon.

She was surprised by the quiet. Traffic droned overhead, but at ground level, there weren't many people out. A few stragglers seemed to be returning to their offices from a late lunch. A C-Sec cruiser flew low overhead, its lights flashing, but it moved off, up the curve of the station, and into the distance.

Ashana didn't have much money, but she found café where there were more turians than any other race and bought herself a bun filled with dextro-meat and vegetables. She sat chewing slowly, while looking out over the river that flowed through the center of the Presidium. Looking up, she saw the shadow of the Presidium pass briefly over the artificial sky. A moment later, a swarm of official vehicles went blaring past, C-Sec cruisers in formation in front of a motorcade, carrying one of the councilors and their delegation. The vehicles banked and seemed to angle up into the air, passing into a tunnel that would take them to the top of the tower.

Ashana was getting up from her table when a three-fingered hand appeared on her forearm.

"Please." It was Gell. "Sit."

Ashana did as he said, looking down at the remnants of her half-eaten bun, and then at Gell. He had paler skin than hers, more gray than brown, and amber-colored irises. He smiled at her. She thought he might be kind, and wondered if he was. Again she thought of Shen, his hands in her hair, and on her breasts as she rocked back and forth in his lap. Then she remembered he was dead.

"You're doing better," Gell said. Without her asking, he added, "Our construction business has an office up here."

Ashana smiled, while her geth hummed in her thoughts. Gell ordered something to drink, and they sat quietly. She touched his hand, and he hers, and they let their geth commune for a while, before breaking contact.

"You haven't been released from the hospital yet, have you?" Gell asked.

Ashana shook her head, and gestured toward the cane she'd used to amble this far. "I'm not yet ready for a visit to Zakera point. Not physically, anyhow."

Gell nodded and sipped the drink he'd ordered. She took his hand in hers this time. _Tell me about Liara T'Soni_, she asked him. Gell shook his head. _She took us_, his geth said. _She said we were helping the asari Councilor commit treason. _Ashana didn't understand.

"I don't know what to say," Gell told her. "I found something that belonged to T'Soni's mother," he said. "At first we didn't know what it was, except that it was an old asari artifact. We called someone at Deniri's office to send an expert."

"Did they send one?"

"They did," Gell answered. "And then a few hours later, half a dozen more. Only this time the experts had guns and a bad attitude." His geth showed her a picure of the canister as Gell had found it, and another as it had been left for him to hand over to T'Soni. The contents had been examined and carefully put back as they were, though several key objects were missing, one a unit patch for a commando outfit called The Lovers. "I passed the container on to Dr. T'Soni. Apparently it was her mother who buried it. Whatever she learned from the data storage devices sent her to where she found you."

"I guess I'm supposed to feel lucky," Ashana said. She gestured at her cane, but as she did, something seemed to tear inside her and her stomach clenched. She put both hands on the table and collapsed onto the ground.

#

Two days later, while the salarian doctor clucked his tongue disapprovingly, and the nurses fussed over her fresh bandages, Ashana stared out the window. Down below, along the watercourse, she could see the low terrace where she had enjoyed her moment of freedom.

#

Gell stayed away. According to the news broadcasts, something terrible was happening on Pirin, where a parasitic infestation was spreading among the locals, driving them mad, and then killing them. The entire colony had been abandoned. The Council was "investigating," whatever that meant, but already there was speculation that the leviathans were expanding into Alliance controlled space. Even Ashana, as apolitical as she was, could tell that wasn't good.

The tearing sensation in her stomach finally gave way to a dull itch. The nurses removed her dressings. According to them, she was as good as new, but the skin on her abdomen didn't match the rest of her body. It was pale, nearly gray, like Shen's had been. The rest of her was a dark tan, freckled here and there. The divide between the lab skin and what she considered _herself_ was marked with a little line, almost like the groove between two floor tiles, where they'd sealed her shut with a surgical laser.

"Will it ever be the same color?" she asked the nurse, a gentle asari, who never said much.

She only shook her head and said, "It's never quite the same." Drawing back her sleeve, she showed Ashana a patch on her arm that was a different shade of blue. She didn't seem to read Ashana's expression, her terror over the thought of taking her clothes off in front of someone for the first time to have them see _this_.

"How long before I can go?" she asked.

"A few days," she said and turned to leave. She'd been gone for a few minutes already when Ashana realized that when they released her she didn't have anywhere to go, not really. She couldn't go home to Rannoch yet. Not without something to show for it, other than new skin paid for by an asari war hero.

She got out of bed and shuffled out of her room. There was a lounge where some of the other patients from the unit were relaxing, some with their families, some alone. There was a drell longshoreman, who had lost both of his legs when a container had fallen on him. He had new prosthetics and was still getting used to them. Right now he was sitting, his feet nervously tapping, or perhaps twitching involuntarily against the floor.

Ashana sat down next to him. "Here," she said, and repositioned his legs. The twitching stopped.

"Thanks," he said. For a time they both sat just watching the traffic pass overhead and below.

"Does it ever rain here?" Ashana asked, with a bit of a grin. The drell turned to her.

"I wish it did," he said. He had mottled brown scales that shimmered blue in certain kinds of light, and orange and red lines around his eyes and over the top of his head. "Tamriss," he said, and held out a hand.

"Ashana." They shook. His feet sat still on the floor.

"They tell me my own skin will grow back over the top of these things," Tamriss said. "I kind of like the mechanical look." Ashana smiled. Down below on the commons, a crowd had gathered. At first it looked like a demonstration.

"I wonder what's going on down there," she said.

"Someone's always complaining about something."

The group had gathered around a public news information station, some of them were turning on private screens on their omnitools. Others were walking away, their heads lowered, still others in tears. Nearly half the group, Ashana realized, was asari.

She flipped on her own viewer and turned to Galaxy News, where a portion of the screen flashed over and over again, _DR. LIARA T'SONI, PROTHEAN EXPERT AND HERO OF THE REAPER INVASION, KILLED IN BOMB ATTACK ON OMEGA. _Ashana gasped. Tamriss looked over at her screen. He started to say something, but then went quiet. His scales lost their sheen for a moment. Ashana got to her feet and turned around. All across the lobby the news was breaking. She read it there clearly on the faces of all the staff, the families waiting. Soon it was on all the public screens. A human reporter was speaking from the scene, behind her smoke and fire rose from the upper levels of the structure that housed Afterlife.

"Details are hard to come by," the reporter was saying, "But we understand that Dr. T'Soni and several of her close associates allowed themselves to be captured by Aria T'Loak." The screen cut away to grainy footage of Liara being shoved into Afterlife by a number of armed men. The human reporter went on, "Apparently the capture was a ruse, that allowed T'Soni to smuggle a bomb into the heart of Omega. Over a dozen are reported dead, among them T'Soni. Aria T'Loak, the apparent target, suffered only minor injuries in the blast. T'Loak has survived numerous past attempts on her life over the centuries, most recently another bombing attack on one of her private shuttles nearly ten years ago." There was a pause while the human anchor asked the reporter a few standard questions. While they talked, footage of T'Soni being shoved up the steps of Afterlife played again. There she saw the turian, Varian, who had been sitting at the foot of her bed.

Ashana suddenly wanted to sit down, but stopped herself when a squad of C-Sec officers led by a lanky turian with blue facial markings stepped purposefully into the lobby, stopping at the reception desk, where one of the distraught nurses pointed vaguely in the direction of Ashana's ward.

Her first impulse was simply to run. After so many centuries spent as outcasts, quarians were still often raised to fear and avoid authority, more than they were to respect and obey it. But she couldn't trust her body to move her as quickly as she needed it to. Instead she kept her head down.

The turian was still asking questions of the receptionist. "This is the guy?" he said, apparently not for the first time. "Just look at the damned picture."

"That's him," the nurse said at length. "He hasn't been in. Not lately." The turian straightened to leave. Ashana saw her chance, and slipped around behind the reception desk, behind the nurse, who had hung her jacket her chair, providing a little concealment, as she tried to get away.

She would have made it, too. Taking the jacket with her, she slung it over her shoulders. It was big, but it made her look like she belonged. The elevator had come as though she'd summoned it from halfway across the lobby, and she was stepping aboard, when a big hand took her elbow, and almost gently said, "Far enough, kid."

#

Seven hours later, and they were still asking her the same questions. She had reconstructed the timeline of their departure from the debris field near Nearog for the ruined colony of Lorek, once known as Esan.

Had they found anyone there? What had happened to her comrades? Who had attacked them, and why? Was there a chance anyone from her ship had survived?

Ashana wanted those answers as much as they did. She told what she knew to a young looking human officer, hair shaved nearly to the scalp and no eyebrows, then a salarian, older this time, gray green face with mottled black spots over his brows, and finally to the turian with the blue facial markings. He was from an old Citadel family, had the accent for it, the bearing. Everything he did suggested generations of unflinching service to galactic security.

The human was soft. The salarian, kept circling back to the same main points. _I don't understand_, he said, _How you managed to survive, when the rest of your team didn't._ Ashana explained, again, patiently at first, then growing frustrated. Finally the turian came.

His name was Chief Superintendent Auricus, and had no tolerance for any further lies.

"I've told the truth," Ashana insisted.

"Right," Superintendent Auricus said. A high tone floated along underneath the low growl of his voice. She knew it meant something, but couldn't tell what.

"There was a turian who came to see you," Auricus said. "What was his name?"

"Varian."

"That's it. Just—Varian. No family name, no word about what system or planet."

"He said he was from Niveris."

Auricus made a note of that on a slipscreen he held in his hand. "He say anything else?"

Ashana shook her head.

"What about T'Soni?"

"What about her?"

"She was paying for your recovery," Auricus said. "Why would someone of that stature need to bother with a half-dead quarian?"

"She saved my life," Ashana answered. "Maybe she thought it wasn't worth _just _bringing me to a hospital. Maybe she wanted to ensure I survived."

"She tell you that?"

"No. It's just a guess."

"Are you aware of what she was planning?"

"What do you mean?" Ashana said. "You mean the bomb on Omega?"

Auricus leaned in close, so she could smell the awful tea the turians were always drinking on his horrible turian breath. So she could see the little knife teeth in his awful turian mouth. "Yeah," he snapped, "That's exactly what I mean."

"I never even met her," Ashana said. Auricus stood and pointed at a screen on the wall. Momentarily there appeared an image of her in her hospital bed, her abdomen nothing more than a shredded mass of blood and drains and wires. Standing next to her was Liara T'Soni. Liara was looking right at her. _Why didn't you tell me about this? _She asked her geth. They were silent. Suddenly she felt a humming run through her thoughts, a common sign that her geth were nervous or agitated.

"You met her," Auricus said. "So tell me what she was up to."

"I don't know. I don't even remember talking to her."

Her geth were whispering in her thoughts, but she couldn't quite hear them. Then, suddenly, _They argued. T'Soni and the turian. T'Soni wanted to leave you behind._ Ashana blinked. _T'Soni would have left us all to die._

"And yet she carried you onto her own vessel and transported you here, after stabilizing your condition."

"She and the turian carried me. They took turns she said."

"And the turian never mentioned anything either?" Auricus flexed his mandibles so the jaw-tusks flared out. Already angry, it made his face look downright menacing. "We found her ship," Auricus went on. "On board we found so much restricted tech and illegal weaponry we'd have had to lock her up for a century, even if she hadn't been planning to assassinate everyone on the council, starting with Matriarch Deniri." After a pause he added, "We're rounding up her network now. And I'm betting one of them is going to talk."

"Are you asking me a question?" Ashana said.

"Your time is running out," he fired back. "Tell me now and I can help you. Did you see anything while you were on board?"

"No. I nearly died."

"What about your symbiotes?"

"What?"

Auricus grabbed her by the forearm and pulled her across the table. "Am I going to have to pull them out before you let me talk to them?" Ashana shouted for him to stop, then turned toward the mirror, where she assumed someone might be watching the interrogation. Auricus let her go and took a deep breath, as if to calm down. _Don't let him ask us_, her geth said.

"They don't know anything." _Don't let him_, they said.

"Look," Auricus said. "We've got a probe. Lets us talk to your local colony. Don't make me use it."

"They lost power when I was dying," she said. "They feed of my blood sugar, same as I do."

"Fine." Auricus gestured, and one of the other C-Sec officers wheeled in a device. They found the leads in Ashana's hand, then stabbed two probes through her skin, underneath the leads, and when she began to fight them, they brought in a gurney and strapped her to it. Ashana still fought, but there was nothing she could do. Her geth fought, too, and that went better, for a while, until the frantic hum in the back of her mind faded and faded, and finally let go. The display on the probe's screen changed from one kind of static to another, and Auricus went on with the interrogation.

"Anything you care to add to your host's statements?"

The static flickered, and there was a little noise, a geth shrug. Auricus touched a button on the probe, and the static changed. The hum was back in her mind, her geth were fighting him again.

"You'll get tired of this eventually," Auricus told her geth.

_We do not tire_, her geth answered.

"Ah, it does talk." Auricus touched the button again, and again the static changed, but there was no hum. "What did you see on T'Soni's ship?" Auricus asked.

_We weren't there_.

"Don't get smart."

_It's true._ Auricus leaned toward the probe's monitor. _We returned briefly to the collective, using the communications array on Dr. T'Soni's ship. _

"I thought geth didn't leave their hosts."

_We do not. But we were—afraid. _Inside Ashana's head, her geth said,_ Forgive us._

There was a knock on the door. Auricus glanced up at the two way mirror, and then with a grunt heaved himself up and opened the door. Outside was the salarian C-Sec officer. They had a brief conversation, angry-sounding whispers, then the salarian stepped in, removed the probe, covered the little prick holes with a spray bandage, and unbuckled her from the gurney.

Ashana stood up, and he gestured for her to follow. In the vestibule stood the starchy Son of Admiralty. He offered her his hand, and when she didn't take it, he said, "Right. Come with me."

He led her down the corridor, up a flight of stairs and out a back entrance of and into a landing area. As they walked she asked him what was going on.

"C-Sec never knows when to quit when they're ahead," vas Rannoch told her. "We didn't know where you'd gone," he said, "but when they hooked you up to that machine, your geth got loose and told me to come find you."

"And you came? Just like that?"

"I didn't just come. I was ordered by our Councilor, Grand Admiral vas Idenna, himself. I'm to take you to his personal shuttle and transport you home immediately." Ashana stopped walking. Something in her abdomen itched, which meant pain wasn't far behind. She leaned hard on her cane. Vas Rannoch took her arm in his. "You may not feel important," he said, somehow unable to avoid condescending even at a moment like this, "But you are. C-Sec has stepped on some very large toes."

Up ahead was a gantry that led to the councilor's shuttle. Vas Rannoch urged her to hurry along with him. In short order they were standing on opposite sides of the hatch. Just then vas Rannoch got a call. He said, "It's the Councilor. I must go, but the crew has their instructions." He stepped away with a self-important glance, spoke briefly, and glanced back at the shuttle. "Those were _his_ orders? Specifically? I'm to—? Right. I understand. Understood." Looking back at her, vas Rannoch came up the gantry. His face had gone pale and his jaw was clenched. "New plan," he said, taking hold of her arm and pulling her out of the shuttle. From somewhere in his stiff outfit, he had produced a pistol, and now stood directing it toward the main entrance to the landing bay.

He pressed the entry console on the shuttle, and the hatch slid shut. He tapped twice on the hull, and stepped away as the maneuvering thrusters began to throttle up. Over the noise he shouted at Ashana to follow him.

Nearby was a barrier, and as they took cover behind it two rockets and several long bursts of automatic weapons fire struck the side of the shuttle. The shields took the brunt of the damage, but one of the maneuvering thrusters caught half a dozen rounds and the craft listed hard to one side, nearly flipping over before the pilot regained control. Trailing thick black smoke, the craft slowed, drifted toward the other side of the bay, and landed hard on one of the walkways to their left.

More shooting, and then there was a series of loud bangs as the shuttle's crew blew the emergency hatches. Shouting, and the sound of footsteps racing on the metal walkways. Ashana tried to raise her head to look out, but vas Rannoch grabbed her arm.

"Just wait," he said.

There was more shouting. Ashana heard Auricus shouting for them to lie face down on the ground, then the shuttle crew protesting that they were protected by diplomatic immunity, and that the quarian Councilor would have their badges.

"Now," said vas Rannoch, and he gestured for another bit of cover, not far from another shuttle, parked along the same walkway. Reaching this, they climbed down into the space underneath, and then through a hatch that led into a maintenance corridor underneath the docking bay.

"Do hurry," he said. She stumped along as best she could, using her cane.

"Why did they do that?" she asked.

"It seems C-Sec has been ordered to detain you."

"Even after the quarian Councilor sent for me?"

"Even so," vas Rannoch said.

Vas Rannoch opened another hatchway, and they stepped out onto a catwalk just underneath the Citadel's false sky. It seemed low enough that Ashana could touch it, and from here it looked almost like the stained glass she'd seen as a girl at the temples in Geryat, on Rannoch.

The wind here was blowing hard enough that it was difficult to walk against it. Vas Rannoch wasted no time, leading her to a landing platform, from where he hailed a car that flew fast and low out over Tayseri Ward. As they flew he called someone and said, _Five _minutes.

And in fact, five minutes later they landed at Elara Grace Mortuary and Memorial, where a soft-spoken salarian named Eldrin greeted them and led them down two flights of stairs, to a lab, built like a capsule made mostly out of glass or something like it, as thick as her forearm was long. They bid Ashana to step inside and Eldrin went with her. The door shut behind them, and Ashana felt a pop in her ears, as though she'd just stepped into the pressure-vessel of a ship.

Through the intercom she heard vas Rannoch asking, "What now?"

"Turn the key to the 'Safeties Off' position," Eldrin said. Vas Rannoch did something with the console. He looked up at them. "Good. Now hit the red button."

"You're sure about this?"

"Only way," Eldrin said. "Now do it."

There was a commotion in the hallway. Vas Rannoch looked over his shoulder, and wheeled around, pistol leveled at someone in the doorway. He fired twice as he pressed the button with the flat of his palm. He fired again and a bullet struck him square in the chest. There was a terrible squeal of metal on metal, a jet of blood struck the glass, and the lab lurched downward into the black.

They fell for what felt like several minutes before they were ejected out the reverse side of the Tayseri Ward arm. All around them were a multitude of little craft, shuttles, and recycling ships. Farther out, Ashana saw the shipping lanes, dotted with the bright lights of ships approaching or departing from the primary relay. About a hundred kilometers above them was a bright cross of light, the _Destiny Ascension, _which still patrolled the space immediately surrounding the Citadel.

They were adrift, no thrust, no attitude control. Ashana felt a brief moment of panic as she realized she'd traded one predicament for another. With no thrust there was no gravity, simulated or otherwise, and everything in the lab that wasn't secured began to drift around the interior. The glass walls of the pressure vessel caught the light from Widow, blinding her.

"Allow me," Eldrin said. He touched something on a console and the glass darkened somewhat, until it was dim enough to for Ashana to open her eyes again. Behind them, the Citadel was receding. Eldrin had comm channel open on his omnitool.

"Yes," he said, "We're away. I'm afraid your man didn't make it." After a pause he added, "It seems they had orders to kill on sight." He turned to Ashana. "They gave names. Likely aliases." He paused to listen again. "Yes. In ten minutes. Understood." Ashana had braced herself on a rail that projected from the ceiling. "Are you harmed?" Eldrin asked her.

She shook her head. "No more than I already was."

"Mm." He came over to her, poking her here and there with his long fingers. "Yes. It seems you're fine. Physically."

Ashana closed her eyes. She saw vas Rannoch again, the bullet punching a fist-sized hole in his back. There was the mist of blood and threads of flesh that had stuck to the capsule's exterior as he'd launched them into space. Alive one instant, dead the next. She wondered if he'd known that in helping her he would die. She closed her eyes and saw Shen.

"State of mind?" Eldrin said.

"What?"

"You just saw a man die, I can't imagine that sits well with you."

"It wasn't the first time."

"Yes. Certainly."

"Still."

Eldrin put his hand on her forehead. Salarians did it as a comforting gesture, but she pushed him away. The capsule was rotating slowly. Now the Citadel was in full view in front of her.

"I always thought my life would end here," Eldrin said, apparently for no reason, "Not that it would start here again."

"What do you mean?"

"This capsule. A dangerous specimen lab. Just recently we studied the Pirin parasite." He gestured at some lab equipment at the far end of the capsule. "This vessel is meant to be purged. Plasma kills anything inside, then the whole lab can be ejected into space. In case needed."

"And now we're trapped?"

Eldrin shook his head. "I worked for Liara T'Soni."

"She's dead now."

"Alas, yes. And they're rounding up her associates. I fear I might have met the same fate as your friend back there. There are systems in place to make sure we—Dr. T'Soni's friends—survive, even after she departed. Today, you and I are benefitting from her hard work and carefully laid plans."

Eldrin pointed up at the Citadel. Suddenly it disappeared as something passed over them. The object was large enough that Ashana didn't realize at first that it was a ship, a massive Alliance-built container transport. One of the compartments opened. Almost immediately a set of grapples deployed and pulled the capsule inside.


End file.
